Everyone should have known. They should have known as surely as though it were written in the curved palm of the wind. They should have known when they looked up at the empty sky; they should have known when they looked down at the hungry children. Yet somehow they did not know that their last migratory hunt was almost over. The straggling band had woven its slow trail among the mountains for forty days of vanishing hopes and shrinking stomachs. Ahead of the main party, the scouts had crawled until their knees and palms were raw; but still there was no track of game, and the only scent was that of the pungent air that rose from the ragged peaks of ice.
At last they halted, only a few footsteps from The Cave of the Fallen Sun, the farthest western reach of their frozen domain. In the rear of the column the women threatened the children into silence and the scouts went first to the mouth of the cave to look for signs of an animal having entered. Presently the scouts stood up with their massive shoulders drooping, turned to the rest and made a hopeless gesture.
Atanta, who stood alone and motionless between the scouts and the rest of his band, knew that all were waiting for him to use his magic to make a great leopard appear in the empty cave. "A very great leopard," he thought sarcastically. Enough to feed them all for a hundred days. A leopard so huge it would whine pitifully while they killed it. A leopard so gigantic that it would not leave its footprints in the snow. Indeed, Atanta was sure, the leopard his people wanted would be much too large to fit into the cave. Well, perhaps there would be a bird.
He held himself very tall and straight so that his dejection might not show to either his people or his gods. But after forty days of the trackless hunt, Atanta felt with certainty that the gods were deaf or dead ... or at least very far away.
The sun was hot and the gods were gone, and he would not keep his people waiting with false hopes. He closed his eyes and took up the crude bone cross that hung from his waist, and he cursed the gods with silent venom. And when his chastisement of the delinquent gods was done, he dropped the cross to dangle at his waist again.
Two hunters moved stealthily forward, their spears disappearing before them into the cave. It was somehow pathetic, Atanta felt, the way they moved so courageously into the empty darkness.
How many caves had there been, Atanta wondered, since they left the mouth of the river? Fully a dozen, always empty, except for the scattered bones of bears and men. Perhaps he should have kept his people at the river. No, he told himself. He had done the only thing he could do. The season had been bad and their meager catch of fish carefully stored. But the already heavy ice thickened with the approach of winter and made fishing almost impossible. When their supplies were almost gone, he had done as so many had done before him. He had led his people on the futile hunt, hoping for the miracle of a dozen sleeping bears or a great white leopard. Such miracles had happened in the past. Once he had gone with his father on such a winter hunt.
But miracles without footprints were quite another matter. That was the way his people lived: just existing when the catch was good, starving when it was not.
Presently the two hunters stepped out of the darkness with the blunt ends of their spears dragging behind them, and their countenances told the others that the cave was indeed empty.
Children began to cry. Women picked up their packs and slung them across their shoulders. The men mumbled inaudible words that turned into whisps of smoke in the icy air. At Atanta's signal, everyone entered the ice-floored cave, thankful at least to be out of the blinding brightness of the sun and snow, and into the soothing dark where they could rest.
Atanta stood while his people stretched their furry bodies out over the frozen ground. He looked down at his woman who lay before him, watching him with her black eyes large and warm. It made his stomach clutch itself into an angry knot, to see her young face so drawn with exhaustion and hunger. There were lines in her face he had never seen before; the fur of her head and body had lost its sheen and was now brittle and dry. She patted the ice and motioned him to lie down beside her; but he turned his eyes away from her, because he knew that he must tell the others before he could rest.
"Listen to me," he said, and his voice rang through the ice-sheeted cave. The tired eyes of the men and women opened and everyone sat up.
How should he tell them? They were waiting now. Should he simply say it swiftly and have done with it? Tell them that they had followed an impotent god until now they were to die? Surely he should prepare them somehow. Prepare them for the importance of what he was to say.
"Listen, for I tell you of the end of the empty caves."
He stood silent for a moment watching hope filter into their faces, hope that made their dull eyes shine in the semi-darkness.
"Do not let joy curl your lips until you have listened, for it would be a false joy."
The lines of tiredness and worry returned to the faces about him. Atanta did not look down at his woman's face, for she knew him very well and she would know what he had to do.
"We are told of a time long ago, when the cave of man was filled with food as the night is filled with stars, and the caves and the men covered the five corners of the world. But these were not the caves that we know now. They were magic caves, and these were magic men. The men of that long-ago world created the very mountains into which they dug their caves. The mountains they created raised their peaks through the highest clouds, and every mountain held countless caves ... caves stuffed with bear and fish and captive winter winds. These were magic times when every man was a priest. Every man could make fire blossom from nowhere and every man could fly through the air like a bird.
"All this was long ago when the world was young, and the world was hot, and our people could live in the heat. But Nuomo the God of Night became jealous of these magic men, for he had seen them fly into the night itself in search of the stars. And so Nuomo wrapped his black wings around the world and shook it for ten tens of days. The world cracked and burst with flame that sprouted up into the darkened sky. The people ran in terror and their mountain-caves were sucked down into the earth or burned into ash by the flame. At the end of the ten tens of days, Nuomo thought that all were dead and so he rolled a sheet of ice across the earth to cool it.
"Only one man was able to escape the wrath of that ancient god. He was an old man with only little magic and he felt himself on the edge of death. He look from his body a rib which he fashioned into a son. But he made the son in such a way that he could live upon the ice itself, as we do now.
"The son knew that the old man was about to die, and so he said: 'Father, use your magic to make a woman to keep me from being lonely.'
"'Woman!' the old man cried. 'I should think you would want me to teach you the use of magic.'
"'Yes, father,' the son answered, 'if you can.'
"'No,' the old man told him. 'I am so near to dea............